Here are a few quick sketches from my week. My favorite is the installation of enormous, inflatable bunnies at the Brooks Museum of Art. It's an installation about invasives and the damage they do by Australian artist Amanda Parer, but she admits it's also winsome, and the child in me is utterly delighted. I was also excited to do such an interesting nocturne piece, and I'll have to go back and do more before they depart Memphis.

There was also cake in my immediate past (Muddy's Bake Shop, my favorite), and a trip to the Metal Museum. It's been a lovely week.

Here is my sketch from the same painting that I did in the exhibition 13 years ago.

In January 2003, Cheekwood in Nashville hosted the traveling exhibition of the Helga Pictures by Andrew Wyeth. These drawings and paintings were done over about 15 years with his neighbor as his model. There is a depth in the detail and intimacy of these pieces that take your breath away. I have trees I have painted that long, but no people. Except, oddly, myself, in spurts. I'm not a steady maker of self portraits, but I do bursts of them at intervals. I'm in one of those bursts now, and there are some simliarities, as there are with the Hopper portaits I've also been looking at.

I had forgotten completly about seeing this exhibition until I recently found my sketchbook, and it all flooded back. I did a whole series of sketches in this show, and it was fun to see them again. I thought I'd put them here for anyone interested.

I copied down a bunch of his quotes as well from the text panels. One which is resonating for me at the moment, in the middle of my solo woman in a big world series of self portraits is this; "I think anything like that -- which is contemplative, silent, shows a person alone -- people always feel is sad. Is that because we've lost the art of being alone?"

I'm doing a lot of getting-ready-for-shows work, but I managed to take a little time and work on my Will you?/Won't you? signpost self portrait. It's almost finished.

I also printed the invitations for the upcoming studio sale today on my treadle operated Chandler and Price. It's always great fun to run the big press.

Plus I had a deadline for the Memphis Daily News today for my monthly sketch feature, so I headed down to the Woodruff-Fontaine House to sketch it all decked out for Christmas. They're having an open house this Friday evening, so it seemed like a good moment to feature them.

publicly invited Mr. Darcy in a facebook post to come in for the interview as well. He's got three rescues of his own and knows that Mr. Darcy is my constant art companion. So we both went in this morning to the studio.

What I realized today (aside from what a southern accent I have, which hits me annually as I do this interview for my big show of the year) is that my brain really closes one book artistically and moves straight into something else. I came home from Paris and spent a good bit of time painting and making prints from the landscape watercolors that I did there, but in the two weeks since the show got on the walls, I've completely shifted over to this new series I'm doing, and that's what was in my brain to talk about. Fortunately the first one of the self portraits was in the show, so it was a legit topic of conversation. And talking about the trip and my art process gave me things to say that weren't "Hey, I did this specific piece that you can't see because it's radio!"

So here's the interview, about 15 minutes, for anyone who's curious.

My work for the Daily News has given me a leg up on the calendar this year. Here is one of Jerry's SnoCones I did for them over the summer. I'm laying out both Memphis and Paris calendars this week and will have them available for order soon. I'll have a bunch of full page watercolors like this one, but following in last year's footsteps, I'll also include a few more sketchbook feeling pages as well. Here's my musician one for this year. A sketch of Breeze Coyolle's band on top and Le Tumulte Noir on the bottom.

I also think I'm going to be a little self indulgent and include my show from last year at the Dixon. It was such a highlight for me that I want to just keep savoring it a little bit. I'll probably make that one March for my birthday. I'll post the full set of images and get them up for order soon.

The skies have been amazing here. Both the real ones and the painted ones in the Orsay. I wrote earlier about the Redon portraits with fantastical clouds as backgrounds, and the magical realism is still speaking to me. I've always loved Redon, but that's never been my style. I decided I just had to try my own cloud portrait, though, having already done a starry background one after the Van Gogh portrait I love in the Orsay.

I'm not sure where, if anywhere, I'll go with this series, but it feels really good to get outside of my regular work and have the time and creative space to try something new. It's a huge gift to get away from the business side of things (packaging, framing, shows, deadlines) and have time to purely create art and listen to the voices inside. I'm so grateful for this chunk of creative time in Paris. And having the Orsay as a neighbor has deeply enriched the experience.

I've spent a couple of really lovely cloudy afternoons in the Musee d'Orsay lately. I absolutely love doing small sketchbook studies from paintings that move me. I use my tiny mint tin watercolor kit and a water brush to keep from having an open cup of water in a musuem. It's let me really paint from the art, and I'm so grateful.

Above is Whistler's portrait of his mother. I'd seen reproductions and spoofs of this piece for years without really paying attention to it. Then I came around the corner, and it absolutely gobsmacked me. So powerful in person.

Below is a quite large Maurice Denis. I love the composition and how the ground spreads out toward the viewer, giving you a birds eye view and inviting you in.

This is one in the surrealist section, where I spent most of my time the other day. I had to go back and paint it today. It's by Alexander Harrison, born in Philadelphia and died in Paris. This one really struck me for its quietude.

Here are a couple of others I did earlier that didn't fit with my cloud or nocturn posts that I put a couple of studies in. The first is the third Odilon Redon study I did. I love his ethereal, otherworldly pieces. Similar to Chagall, but much more lovely to my eye. This one of Caliban seemed whimsical and appealed to my Shakespearean upbringing.

Finally here is a Vuillard. I've really fallen in love with him during my time at the Orsay. This is a quite large tempera painting that was done as a decorative panel for a tea room. I love the sketchy indistinctness of it, as well as the glowing sense of light in the original that I didn't manage to capture here.

Skies are truly calling to me this trip. I've been painting them myself but also looking at the way other people paint them. Of the five studies I did in the Orsay today, three featured skies. Above is Henry Tanner, 1905, Christ and his disciples on the road to Bethany. The combination of tree plus moon got me. I wish I'd been able to replicate his deep purple-y blue of the sky.

I spent most of my day with the surrealists today. I've loved Rodin since a show of his I saw as a teen, though it's never been the kind of art I do. For many years I was a pure landscapist. But I've been feeling drawn to having more narration in my work the last few years, and I love the mystery of Redon's paintings. The way he captures deeper truth by taking liberties with the surface truth. That's a bit of how I felt with the self portrait I did against the stars recently. Here Rodin is using clouds as a backdrop for two portraits, the way Vincent used stars.

I love the one of the boy best (I'm guessing his son by the name), but I was struck by the very realistic woman sitting in a demure armchair with carefully rendered embroidery juxtaposed with the fantastical sky. This feels a bit of what I wanted to do in those recent self portraits. Since I'm also doing so many cloud studies recently, I may have to try my own one of these as well.

I had already warmed up for the Orsay, unknowingly, by doing another cloud study over breakfast this morning. It's a skies sort of day.